The Fields Beneath (29 page)

The trend started in Islington, where a complex of Georgian squares had indeed been overlooked for too long, but as it spread to Primrose Hill, Fulham and Camden Town around 1960 and to Kennington and Kentish Town a year or two later, a bemused public and a number of delighted estate agents began to realise that though the architecture was an important factor in this reassessment of worth, the crucial factor was a house’s position. The very nearness of these areas to central London, which for all the earlier part of the century had been a disadvantage in most buyers’ minds, had become
the
selling point. While it would be untrue to say that no one, any longer, cherished dreams of a country cottage in Mill Hill, it became apparent that a substantial section of the upper and middle classes were now prepared – even eager – to live in the very areas from which their parents and grandparents had departed for greener fields.

The reasons for this radical shift have not to date been adequately explained, but a number of factors can be suggested. It would be simplistic to suppose that previous generations had just failed to notice the convenience of living near to town and near to buses, tubes and shopping centres, and that it only needed a few pioneers to point the way for light to dawn. The truth must surely be that, between the later nineteenth century and the 1950s, the disadvantages of the old inner areas were marked enough to outweigh the advantages. An important consideration during this period was, simply, the dirt of life near the centre. We tend now to forget – and many people approaching adulthood have never known – the sheer filth of London in the days when every household was warmed by one or more coal fires and all trains were steam. In Camden and Kentish Towns the train smoke alone from all the shunting yards must have ensured that the districts remained unattractive to middle-class families. It is surely no coincidence that these districts began to appeal again to the middle classes around 1960, precisely at the time when the steam trains were being withdrawn for good and when the clean air legislation that followed the ‘smog’ scare of the late 1950s was beginning to have a real impact on people’s heating arrangements.

Socially, too, the situation had changed somewhat, even before the moneyed ‘outsiders’ began to arrive. To be working class in the late 1950s was to be enjoying a new prosperity and new health and welfare amenities of which previous generations had never dreamed. In a nutshell, the working classes no longer seemed ‘different from us’ to the young middle-class generation who were themselves enjoying a
less
sheltered and privileged life than many of their parents. Servants, in the traditional sense, had disappeared. The gulf between the young working-class wife pushing her small (planned) family in a pram, and the young upper-middle-class wife pushing
her
family in a similar but often rather smaller pram, was genuinely less than it had been at any earlier times. The schools, playgrounds and doctors’ surgeries of traditionally working-class areas no longer filled the emancipated middle-class parent with forebodings about germs and swear words.

Other factors are harder to pin down. It is said that the revival of a taste first for Georgian and then for Victorian architecture has had much to do with the way the inner suburbs have become visible again: the ‘leprous, peeling facades’ and ‘Victorian monstrosities’ of the 1920s and 1930s observer had by 1960 become ‘delightful period properties’. But did this shift of view help to provoke the rediscovery of the Victorian districts, or did the fashion for all things Victorian which reached its chic peak about 1970 actually stem, in part, from the fact that people had already sought out Victorian town architecture for other reasons? A taste for urban stucco rather than suburban mock-timbering is the superficial expression of something much deeper – a rejection of the rural idyll in favour of a more sophisticated and cosmopolitan one, fashionably egalitarian. Over large parts of southern England the country village, in its traditional form, had died, killed off by various things including the influx into it of moneyed refugees from places like Kentish Town. It was the children and grandchildren of those refugees who returned, with a new if disguised romanticism, to seek another village – a village in the city.

Obviously the country’s prosperity in those never-had-it-so-good years, however misguided and illusory it now seems in retrospect, meant that there was far more money available for house purchase than there had been in the depressed inter-war period, and this in itself tended to have an inflationary effect on concepts of value. Prices for small terraced houses will only rise from £500 to £1000 to £2500 to £7000 to £15,000 and upwards in the space of a decade or so if the money is in fact there. It was this same prosperity that produced the municipal redevelopment bonanza. Ironically, the beginning of the 1960s, when prices really began to rise steeply, was just the time when councils like St Pancras began to set the machinery in motion for long-cherished schemes, regardless of the fact that some at least of the supposed ‘slums’ due to come down were now valuable, well-modernised properties. Private interests and municipal attitudes were thus set on an inevitable collision course.

In 1964 a Town Planning Consultant’s Report was issued for west Kentish Town, the old Southampton Estate. Today, it makes curious reading. A certain sophistication had crept in since the days when domestic heaven was supposed to lie at the top of a tower block with acres of space around it. High rise blocks had already come in for a lot of criticism, though it took the collapse of Ronan Point block in East London in 1968 to provide pig-headed local planning officers with a face-saving excuse for changing their policy. The authors of the 1964 plan appear to have been aware of the dangers of having ‘ground that belonged to everybody and nobody … an anonymous expanse of building blocks having neither front nor back, beginning nor end … the recognised urban values thrown out with the bathwater.’ And yet the comprehensive redevelopment plan they produced was, in many respects, a recipe for just that. Virtually the whole of west Kentish Town was to be demolished and replaced with blocks of varying heights, most of them not set along road systems. Many of the minor streets were to disappear altogether. In the Crimea area tower blocks were to be constructed. The basically ruthless and high-handed attitude to the landscape of people’s lives is betrayed by the remark ‘Of the old streets only Kelly street is worth preserving …’ In other words the criteria for ‘slum clearance’ had stealthily shifted over the years from ‘Is this in such bad condition it needs knocking down?’ to ‘Is this of sufficient architectural interest to be worth making out a special case for keeping it?’ Somewhere along the line the declared purpose of local authority redevelopment had been lost.

Once again, the planners had some good ideas. They made much use of the term ‘penetration’ and the text accompanying the plan explained it in terms of vistas and through-walks, with the North London Railway viaduct retained and exploited as a landscape feature. There was the preoccupation with communal leisure activities which seems to have been a permanent feature of all town planning pipe-dreams from Hampstead Garden Suburb on, and there was also provision for a ‘quarter … of studios, workshops, clubs and secondhand shops’ – without any awareness that such things never flourish in new, custom built property which is by definition too expensive for them. The artificially created open spaces of the County of London Plan were also revived.

Bits of this plan eventually came to pass, to the accompaniment of furious protests, arguments, counter-arguments and public meetings. But really 1964 was too late – by just a year or two – to introduce anything quite so high-handed. Two years earlier, similarly sweeping plans for the area north of Queen’s Crescent (Grafton Ward and Gospel Oak) were set in motion, and were to take – except in Oak Village itself, which had become an enclave of battling, wealthy owner-occupiers – their relentless course. Over the next fourteen years much of the area that had been ‘home’ to Grosch before 1914 and to Montagu Slater between the wars was reduced to a wasteland of one kind or another – emptied, boarded houses, churned earth, blocks that the local people christened ‘Colditz’. It was partly
because
of this that, by the mid-sixties, public opinion, in the form of Civic Societies and local residents’ associations, was at last becoming mobilised to fight municipal domination. Much to their own surprise, the Council, the fairy-godfather giver of new homes, found that they had a fight on their hands.

It was unfortunate, but inevitable, that the people who first took up the battle were the articulate middle-class newcomers to the district rather than the long-term working-class residents. For a while, the whole issue threatened to degenerate into a political battle across class divisions – a view of the matter fostered by some councillors, who found it convenient to cast the people who opposed redevelopment in the role of capitalist baddies which enabled the goodies to be the traditional deserving poor whom the Council was only trying to help. The baddies, it was suggested, were decadent in their obsession with conserving the old, and were thereby depriving the working classes of their right to have bathrooms. Yet in fact the working classes had, if anything, more to lose than the middle classes if their streets were destroyed. They would have less chance of moving elsewhere and would have to accept what they were given in the way of a council flat. But for so long the idea had been promulgated that only by knocking everything down and starting all over again could you achieve watertight roofs and indoor lavatories, that many ordinary people began to believe this was indeed the only way and to look askance on ‘Save Our Street’ campaigns. Once again, as centuries before, a middle-class presence in Kentish Town was having its effect, and no one, at first, knew quite how to take this.

A woman I visited in 1975 in her new flat south of Queen’s Crescent (a fragment of the 1964 plan that did finally get itself built) had been the founder and leader of a tenants’ association which had set itself to oppose the local Civic Society over
their
opposition to the Council’s plans:

The social problem was in fact much more complex than it was made to seem, either by the Council or by the new middle-class owner-occupiers. The latter claimed, with truth, that they were saving a large part of Kentish Town from turning into the sort of desert which great tracts of south and east London had become, and thereby benefitting their working-class neighbours as much as themselves. However it was also indisputable that many of them, however innocent and well-intentioned in themselves, were only there occupying those particular houses at all because working-class tenants had been displaced from them. ‘Gentrification’ began to be used as a ready-made sneer on the lips of those who were, inevitably, articulate and middle class themselves but did not want to see themselves that way. They pointed out – again, with some truth – that the fabric of nineteenth-century housing was being preserved and restored at the expense of the teeming life it had previously sheltered. Notoriously, houses in multi-occupation were emptied of their numerous tenants, by house agents not always over-scrupulous in their methods, in order that each might be sold to just one middle-class family.

What these critics did not admit, however, was that this evil in the private sector was paralleled by their own shortcomings in the public sector. For the old houses had provided a pool of cheap, rented accommodation, sub-standard perhaps but flexible – and this was just what council housing did not provide. If you were a short-term tenant without security of tenure, between being displaced by a comparatively wealthy family and being displaced by a redevelopment scheme there was not much to choose. Worse, even if those occupying parts of terrace houses when the moment came for redevelopment did get allotted council flats, it still meant that the stock of easily rentable accommodation was steadily being eroded.

One group affected were the hard-up newcomers to London who had traditionally always found their first shelter in little-regarded places like Kentish Town. Paradoxically, this student and sub-student world was, by the late 1960s, bigger than it had ever been before. All over west Kentish Town houses that would once have provided the accommodation wanted were being emptied by the council in preparation for redevelopment, but many of them remained empty for years before the bulldozers arrived. The solution was obvious, and people took the law into their own hands, all the more so since this coincided with the radical chic of the period. The early squatters in Kentish Town, around 1970, were mostly organised through relatively respectable bodies such as Student Community Housing. They came to some agreement with the council, who were themselves inclined to take a tolerant, fashionably liberal attitude towards them, and paid a minimal rent and rates. For a brief period the condemned houses lived again, as ‘community shops’ were opened with varying degrees of success, people made and sold yogurt (that accepted sign of pure ideals), handbags, African drums. But these authorised squatters were followed by others, less benign. At first even these tended to be people with some kind of ideological axe to grind, real or bogus, but they were soon followed by people without even such moral pretensions, who squatted merely for convenience – semi-criminals, drug addicts, alcoholics, runaway teenagers, the human flotsam which
has
always floated to the slums, in every century, and now readily invaded the slums which the council, in its unwisdom, had created with planning blight. Council attitudes to squatting were forced to harden. Meanwhile other local residents, infuriated by the litter left around, by the way the milk was stolen from their doorsteps every morning, by the shouts and loud music in the night, and by (I quote) ‘the naked copulation in the gardens’, decided to take the law into their own hands in their turn. One night the police in Holmes Road were telephoned and told that if they didn’t ‘do something’ about the squatters in Marsden Street (off Malden Road) someone else would. Someone else did, and a battle followed in which a nest of squatters were routed, it is said, with pitchforks, and several of them ended up in hospital.